puzzling the mind

One of my favorite mental exercises a few years ago was to go slowly through logic-puzzle games. Whenever I’d be in the airport waiting for a flight back home from college, I’d pick up a little magazine with a dozen or so LSAT-type logic games. For some reason, once I started work, I kind of stopped doing those altogether…it was almost like I had totally forgotten it was an interest of mine.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that the my relatively lower creative score (that is, compared to the class) comes on the heels of my ignoring this series of fun exercises for the last few years. I used to actually see myself as more creative than I do now. Some of my relative rank is attributable to my peers, to be sure – I look around and see more creative colleagues/peers now than I’ve ever been around either at work or in sports. But I really think the other part of it is parallel to working out – I haven’t been flexing my mental muscles by doing regular workouts with the logic puzzles.

So, I made a run to the bookstore about two weeks ago. “Where are your logic puzzle books?” I asked. This was a pretty small bookstore in downtown Berkeley, so they just didn’t happen to have the types of puzzles I was looking for. So I went on to the Borders near my apartment in San Francisco, where they have no less than 4 shelves of logic puzzles. To my chagrin, roughly 3.75 of these 4 shelves consisted of Sudoku books. I have nothing at all against Sudoku, but it’s the same game every time, just with differential levels of difficulty. The remaining 0.25 shelves did not have anything I wanted, so I was stuck doing a few online to start getting back into the swing of things.

But my wife loves me, so when she went to the bookstore in search of some titles to help us find hotels for our honeymoon, she also snagged me a Kurt Smith logic puzzle book. I had a total of 4 hours in planes and airports this weekend (alone) so I was stoked. Nothing made me so happy as to be figuring out how many of which type chocolate bars went to Tyler, Max, Aaron, and Tim, and who ate them in which order. That’s what I’m talking about!

So now I am doing 1-2 puzzles a day to keep the creative muscles in my mind working. On BART on the way back from school, sitting on the couch while dinner is in the oven, during the intermission of the Red Wings game, whatever…as long as my rib is still fractured and I can’t do anything to exercise my body, might as well do everything possible for the mind.